The truth here is that so much money was getting tossed around at the time for rocketry that it was often a "Flavor of the Month(tm)" for names and designs. The reason why it was called Jupiter was because it was supposed to succeed the Saturn-class vehicles in terms of size.
The real reason they weren't use, like you mentioned, is that it wasn't really needed. Manufacturing facilities may have also been limited, but I seriously think that was not a major issue at the time. The Apollo project was in many ways like Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, or even the Great Pyramid in Giza in terms of manpower and resources devoted to getting it to work. It touched just about every single high-tech industry. I remember "putting on" the helmets used for Apollo 16, and that was with a very minor company that was only a sub-sub-sub contractor.
The number of people working for either NASA, related Air Force projects, or NASA contractors numbered in the millions, and represented more than 15% of the Federal Government in terms of spending... at one point getting very close to Defense spending in terms of the amount of money going out the door. And that was during the middle of a war in the USA (Vietnam). This is why I doubt having a factory to build the things was a problem, because a whole new factory would have been built from scratch had it really been needed. Virtually a blank check to get the rocket to the moon.
To talk about specialized facilities, I would say that the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC is about as specialized as they come. It was built for the Apollo Program (not the Shuttles... although it was modified for the Shuttle program later). This is also where I was trying to point out that much larger rockets were intended to be built there. Not much additional work was done to accomodate the space shuttles, because it was built to deal with much wider rockets, like the full Shuttle and launch pad. Even the Saturn V had ample clearance above the Launch Escape tower, and the crane inside the building could handle a rocket about 100 feet higher.
Other facilities were also added to KSC to deal with the larger rockets, so it is obvious that at least at one point much larger rockets were intended to be launched from KSC.
BTW, thanks for the links to the Nova rockets. Seeing a Saturn V get dwarfed by the other rocket designs really gives a good scale to things. The Saturn V was really a 30-story sky scraper that was intended to fly, and those other vehicles just make me think more of trying to get the Chrysler Building into orbit.
I think what is happening with nuclear energy is that a generation of kids are (hopefully) being taught about nuclear physics by instructors that really know what is going on. It has been several generations now since nuclear reactors have been common place for power generation and running ships in the Navy. The reactors (except for Chernobyl and Three-Mile-Island) havn't had any serious accidents, and even the accidents that have occured was due to sloppy engineering that new reactors don't have to worry about if done correctly.
I also believe that radiation is no longer the big boogy man that it once was, where people would get worried if there is any radiation of any kind. Standing in sunshine and going for a walk will give you exposure to some forms of radiation that, while of the lethal variety, are low enough power that it won't do you any harm besides what has happened for millions of years. Many people are comfortable with microwave ovens (I know, a different radiation kind compared to gamma rays, but ordinary folks don't know the difference) and they use radioactive isotopes in their smoke alarms. These everyday uses in particular bring nuclear technology down to something that an ordinary person can grasp.
There still are hard-core anti-nuclear activists, but often their arguments are so off the wall that they don't get any respect and are perceived more as Luddites rather than having some legitimate gripes about the use of nuclear technology.
What is really interesting is that back in the 1960's NASA had plans for an even bigger rocket than the Saturn V. I think it was called the Jupiter rocket or something like that. About 5x-10x the lift capacity of the Saturn V.
KSC in Florida was actually built to accomodate that rocket, which could only be shipped from the manufacturing facility by barge, because there was no other known form of tranportation was (or for that matter is) capable of transporting a rocket engine that big over larger distances. It was a nightmare just to get the Saturn V to Huntsville, AL. I can't imagine a larger rocket going down the road for 500 miles.
What killed the Jupiter project was that the Saturn V proved capable of sending the lunar equipment up, and Apollo didn't need anything more powerful. Contrasting that to the Russian lunar rocket that blew up on the launch pad in July of 1969, and it goes to show just how incredible the Saturn V rocket really was. And yes, Russia really was that close to getting somebody on the moon before the Americans. After Apollo 11 they (the USSR) pretended that it was never a project goal to get to the moon.
Re:Give the Poor Guy a Rest (not Arrest)
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 1
The nice thing about Montana is that it is a huge state with low population. It is one of the few western states, and the only small (population) western state, to lose representation in the U.S. House or Representatives in the past 30 years.
I would recommend Utah or Nevada as equal candidates, and there are plenty of nuts in these two states as well, but it is starting to get a little crowded there, with the growing population centers of Las Vegas, Reno, and Salt Lake City (St. George could almost be considered a suburb of Las Vegas now.) North Dakota is also a nice spot to get away from just about anybody who is getting in your face.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having Bobby Fischer as a neighbor, and compared to some of my neighbors, he might just fit in too, even with his anti-governmnet attitudes (or even because of them). The problem is that strong-arm police have come here, so it wouldn't solve any of his problems, especially considering how outspoken he is. I'd love to have him for a visit, but I'd have to tell him to move along rather quickly, and that is unfortunate.
Give the Poor Guy a Rest (not Arrest)
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Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 4, Interesting
While Bobby Fischer might have technically violated some U.S. laws, (and this one technicality is just the first that he has dealt with) he really should simply be left alone.
I've been following Bobby Fischer since he started publishing Chess columns in Boys' Life. While not necessarily a hacker, certainly a classic geek.
He all but dropped out of society in almost a Ted Kaczynski fashion, and can IMHO be classified as the most persecuted American by the U.S. Government. He was also wanted a few years ago on tax evasion charges, but I thought that got cleared up. He really has been hounded by the U.S. government for many things, and gone through ups and downs in his life that I would not wish on anybody.
A really good writeup about Bobby Fischer's trip to Yugoslavia is on bobbyfischer.net
I had to use the internet wayback machine because for some reason the regular website is down. Probably due to some slashdotting, although in this case probably not directly due to slashdot it self (surprisingly). Some absolutely incredible articles. I've also seen segments on television news programs that have also discussed his life, and it seems rather pathetic. How much of this is brought onto himself, and how much is out right presecution remains to be debated, but he should really be given a nice quite spot in Montana and be left alone.
Maybe the U.S. government is afraid of letting intelligent people who think the U.S. government is screwed up be left alone.
The problems with cloud seeding are huge, and yes, I will admit that we don't totally understand the dynamics of what makes rain. We do have a pretty good idea, and some very good theories, so when you propose something fantastic and from left field away from the current theories, you must have some incredible evidence as well. Raw speculation simply won't cut it, and we are talking raw basic science here. This is how scientific theories form.
There are incredible amounts of energy that are released in storms, and in particular clouds have to be heavily saturated and ready as well in order to rain. Cloud seeding is attempting to bypass the normal weather mechanisms and cause a cloud to rain when normally it wouldn't.
For example, some people suggested (even here on/.) that perhaps we should use nukes to stop hurricanes. I really am not kidding either, and these were serious proposals that even made it to congress (like they know science as well). The weather forecasting community litterally started to laugh until they realized how serious the proposal was. The point is that the entire nuclear arsenal of the USA, simultaneously detonated, could only at most divert a Hurricane by a few miles. It couldn't possibly stop it because by itself has more power than all of those nukes combined. That is totally ignoring the radiation effects of such an action.
Do you really think that one small plane with a few drops of iodine or other mineral would really make that much difference? You might make a huge difference if you "seed" a few miles before it normally would, or increase the amount of rainfall by about 1%. The questions then would be: How can you tell if it made a difference? Is it really worth the money when you can obtain more water elsewhere? Is this preventing rainfall in areas that really need this water? What other climtological effects does rain seeding do?
There are some very competent scientists working on weather forecasting and study of the physics of weather. Except for the Global Warming issues, there really isn't that much that is controversial regarding what they do, and they don't really get paid that much either, unless they are working for a major market television station. Put away your tin hat and read what real scientist are saying about this topic. If you study this in detail and can prove organic production of clouds, including going up in a Cessna. It wouldn't be hard, and you can even keep the airspeed rather low. Even a sail plane would work if you wanted to make sure that engine noise and exaust would keep bacteria away. If you capture relatively large numbers of organic lifeforms in clouds, and can prove that the clouds themselves form nurseries for these organic lifeforms, I might be considerably more impressed.
Lifeforms in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter would be the next place to look if you can even identify lifeforms that spend most of their lifetimes in clouds themselves. You might even get a NASA grant if you can show even preliminary results for something like this.
Actually, I like that approach for the GPL. I will also openly admit that I was using the GPL as an EULA because I was using a quick & dirty install script that included a space for an EULA, and I didn't want to have to rewrite the logic of that script to make the logic like you said above, or cause the script to crash when I took that "screen" or "page" out of the installation. It was simply easier to throw something into the EULA.
As far as Windows XP: I have a copy of it, and I used it for about 4 months. My computer got corrupted due to something that Microsoft "automatically" downloaded onto my computer to fix some security feature or another. I went and totally wiped my hard drive, Reformatted, and moved to Windows 2000 Pro, which I also had. I also swore that Win2K was going to be the final Microsoft operating system I would ever use. Kinda sucks in some ways, because I've spent several years learning the Win32 API library and diving down into rather basic features of Windows. Now I need to find a new OS to replace Win2K.
I'm strongly leaning toward ReactOS, and I'm hoping that it will be strong enough when the plug finally gets pulled on Win2K. I won't even try Longhorn when it comes out.
How absolutely sure are you that bacterial life is not in the upper atmosphere?
I've heard of bacterial capture as high as 50,000 feet. Do you mean higher than that? Like the 100 km altitude that Space Ship One went to?
And the same about Antarctica. How absolutely sure are you that you can't find some sort of bacterial remains or transport of some kind that can litterally be found in the middle of Antarctica? That is even ignoring the Antarctic research stations where I'm sure you can find bacteria in abundance. I've seen bacterial growth on alpine glaciers high on mountain tops, that live in conditions that are very similar to Antarctica. Antarctica is a big place, and to totally rule out anything living there is just too absolute.
Also, if you think boiling something for a few minutes in water at 100 C is going to kill bacteria, you really don't understand food science at all. What that normally does when you cook is kill bacteria and other organisms that are harmful to people. An autoclave does a much better job, but that is not normally something you would stick a chicken sandwich into.
One reason why it is suspected that bacteria could survive in space is because of Apollo-12, where the Surveyor probe, launched several years earlier, was "accidentally" contaminated before it was launched. Parts of this space probe were returned back to Earth in sealed bags, and it was detected that several bacterial cells survived not only the spaceflight to the moon, but "lived" on the moon for several years before coming back to the laboratories on the Earth. Nobody is claiming that they thrived and multiplied into huge numbers on the Moon, but they were able to survive and when put into a much more hospitable environment (like a petri dish full of agar in an Earth-based lab) they did thrive and begin to reproduce again.
Also, micrometeorites that are the size of a pin-head or even somewhat larger have been known to survive reentry without burning up from re-entry. It is not that difficult to bring things to the Earth that could survive, and certainly something the size of a bacterium could enter the Earth's atmosphere without heating up to several thousands of degrees C.
The only reason reentry is so difficult for spaceflight is because it is a cheap and easy way to reduce speed without having to fire rockets to reduce velocity for a safe landing. This has no relationship to small grains of sand that are orbiting the sun. Even a large rock will only get heated so much coming into the Earth's atmosphere, simply because the entry won't last that long. A very hard landing, but relatively quick transit time through the atmosphere. How many G's of force do you think a bacteria could take? I bet it is quite a bit more than a person could take, by about 1000x.
I have no doubt that you can find some sort of carbon-based cellular life in any environment that has at least some form of water, from the bottom of an ocean trench to the pressurized interior of gysers (sometimes over 300 C), and yes, even in clouds.
What I don't accept is that clouds themselves are a product of bacterial colonies other than as a by-product from releaseing water vapor from inside their cellular structures. Water clouds would form even if the Earth were sterile of life.
You can also find organic shapes from lava flows, like from Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Lava can even form pillowing structures and rounded shapes, and that is just a simple non-organic chemical process, just like you have suggested. Look at some pictures of Io (the moon of Jupiter) to see some other "organic" structures that are clearly from chemical processes. While living things may be on Mars, I seriously doubt any living thing could survive the extreamly hostile conditions on Io, both from extreame heat/cold conditions, the "atmospheric" conditions there, the fact that it sits in the middle of Jupiter's Van Allen Belt (radiation like you wouldn't believe) and other life threating issues. Europa has just enough "heat" getting pumped into it that it can melt water, which is why Europa is considered an even higher candidate right now for Extra-terrestial life in our solar system.
I think some clouds are occasionally found on Mars (getting this back on topic), and that by itself is certainly not proof of life on Mars. Ammonia, methane, and free oxygen are all much larger signs of life because all of these compounds (yes, O2 is a compound) are easily lost to space or consumed very quickly through chemical processes for it to have been sitting there for the past 4 1/2 billion years that is estimated our Solar System has for its age since it left the primordial stellar nursery. All of these compounds are found in abundance in the atmosphere on the Earth, in part because living things are also found in abundance. If you don't think ammonia is that common, you havn't walked past a manure pile lately.
But if you do production in an open shop state, or set up your production company from the beginning to be union-free, why worry about union rules?
IMHO this is one thing that is killing Hollywood as a cinema production center. Labor unions and guilds do have their place, and companies that abuse their workers do deserve the unions they get. Still, if you are offering professional wages for professional work, union rules really don't matter and you can produce whatever you wanted to make.
What caused the problems here was the heavy consolidation of movie production into a very small handful of companies, so it forced the creation of labor unions to combat the management pressures put on the ordinary film production crew members. "A" list movie actors were never an issue here, nor were top script writers. The next tier down, however, did start to suffer due to studio pressure to lower wages, and it got worse for those trying to break into the industry.
The "awsome" thing about open-source scripts and even film scenes is that you can add to the "body" of what has been produced, and start this with a relatively small budget... just a couple of kids struggling with a camcorder and a digital editing system in their basement. The most famous example of what can be produced in a manner like this is THX-1138 a film produced by George Lucas (aka Star Wars) when he was a student at the USC film school. Of course Blair Witch Project can also be compared this way, but it really was produced by some slightly more experienced folks... just for a cheap budget.
I've seen plenty of fan flicks, some of fairly decent quality. Why not extend this idea some more?
I understand what you are saying here, but I don't think you understand how an American judge would view this. If you want to understand that software covered under this license is going to be released in France, I understand.
I just see that software doesn't know boundaries, and software using this license will somehow or another make it to the U.S.A. When it does, American copyright law will take over, as modified by copyright treaties (notably Bern) and agreements between the French and U.S. governments. Ultimately also the U.S. constitution, but let's leave that out of the equation for the moment.
I have a piece of software that was written in France. For example, quite a bit of multimedia software is developed in France that is of quite high quality, some of it even released as an open source software product.
When this software comes into my hands somehow, I look at it, run the software, it does just what I want to do to accomplish some computing/software task, so I want to add it to my own piece of software, possibly even another open source project. That is the whole point of open source/free software anyway.
As I read through the documentation that I downloaded from a website ending in.fr, I discover that it is released using the CeCILL license.
At this point I'll have to yell "DAMN!" and throw it away, because it has the same value as if it had some from some secret Microsoft developer's FTP site for some project kept under wraps by that software company. Or worse yet some code actually written by SCO. (All 10 lines of it.:)
This is because the license does indeed apply to me, and I need to know under what terms I can copy the software and use it. It makes no difference if I am a citizen or resident of France, U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, Ghana, Japan, China, or Pitcrin Island. The license still applies to me. If the license terms spell out that in a juristiction out side of France it reverts to standard Gnu Public License Verion 2 or later, then it should spell out those terms explicitly or I am bound by both French and American law to honor the terms as specified. The CeCILL license as I read it does no such thing. It doesn't even spell out what GPL means, much less say when the GPL goes into effect.
I am saying that there are some legal holes that if you wanted to enforce copyright in the U.S.A. with this software license (I.E. not let Microsoft incorporate it into the next version of Windows Longhorn, without attribution or without even letting you know about some potential flaws in the software you didn't know about, and without source code for anybody that gets the new version of M$ software), it simply won't work. That is fine if you want to simply say that outside of France this software is in the public domain. I don't think that is the goal of this software license, however, or is it?
The other possible outcome is that there is no license to use any software written under the CeCILL license outside of France. If the software is written using this software license, it is illegal for you to even possess it outside of France. That is one thing copyright can do, and is a monopoly that is absolute in the eyes of the law. Certainly no software could be copied outside of France under these terms. This makes it in some ways even worse than propritary software.
Which outcome do you think it should be? You mean to tell me that when you write anything in France (or where ever you live...I know you said you don't live in France), you don't want copyright protection in the USA? For every software project, or even prose like this comment on/., I certainly hope that copyright for this original set of words is still valid in France. I certainly would enforce violations of the GPL to my software in France. Why not expect the same to happen to me here in America for some French software?
As I said earlier, this license is full of holes, and it needs to be understood and read for how it
I'm sorry if you are such a stinking America hater, but that is just too bad.
Of course this was U.S.-centric. I am an American. The parent poster was asking about legal issues in juristictions outside of France, and I gave a U.S. perspective.
I will not develop any code with this license. Period. I stated exactly why, and some specific objections as to why this would not hold up in U.S. courts. I didn't say about what other countries might do with this license, but I would suspect that the net result is pretty much the same.
As far as being superceded by the GPL, it really doesn't cover explicitly what GPL license it is really covering, and in a legal case that is a huge loophole. I don't read that outside of a French juristiction that it may revert to the GPL. It doesn't even say explicitly what the GPL means, other than something related to software called the GPL might be used if you happened to use some additional software and somehow modify the code. Particularly because there was a fairly large definition section, I would expect the GPL to also be explicitly defined in a legal sense. That definition is not there. That is why I suggested the General Party Lounge instead (or was that Gekko Policy Limitations?)
I also don't care what RMS had to say about its applicability. He was wrong if he things it will revert to the GPL as written. This license needs quite a bit more work in order for it to really work as a good open-source license. That was my big complaint.
The point of a supersoaker was for an ambush only. It would be the equivalent of getting gunned down by a Tommy Gun. Sure, it was very brazen, but the rules of the games I was playing didn't specifically prohibit a supersoaker, just that like you said, it was so big that usually it wouldn't be used.
Generally a supersoaker isn't considered a firearm in the usual sense, and if a police officer caught you with one it is less likely that they would draw their own firearm on you. Some of the smaller squirt guns and other "missile" launchers could be mistaken for a firearm, so you might just end up dead by the hands of a cop by mistake if you used them. It still wouldn't be good to hit an on-duty police officer with a supersoaker, however.
I know this is a late question and probably won't get modded up, but I'll ask it anyway:
What lead to the demise of Nupedia? What is wrong with a set of peer-reviewed articles instead of the free-for-all that Wikipedia as turned into? Can a more scholarly version of Wikipedia ever succeed? (I.E. something more like Nupedia where you have to somehow demonstrate knowledge of a particular topic first.)
While I can find info about this elsewhere, I would like to get Jimmy Wales' perspective of this, particularly with his ties to Nupedia in the past.
I've written a couple of installation shells for GPL'd software, and I've put the GPL in the place of the EULA simply as a "in your face" to the installation script when it wants you to put something in there regarding licensing terms.
I actually find seeing the GPL as an EULA as refreshing, precisely due to what you said. You don't have to accept the license, and indeed you could put text on the buttons "Who cares" and "Doesn't matter". With people so used to draconian license terms from traditional Windows software, why not have the GPL as another licensing agreement to have to look through? Technically not exactly accurate, but who really reads the things anyway?
In theory, you might also be able to haul them to New Oreleans and sue under Louisiana law (they still use Nepolianic Code in that state). Interestingly, lawyers from Louisana are the only American attornies who can practice law in France.
This is a huge hole, and I'm not even sure it would hold up in U.S. courts... as in if an American modified software using this this license, would the license even be recognized at all by U.S. Courts? As in would this license even be held to be recognized in a U.S. Court, or would this provision throw the whole license out and invalidate the entire license?
Yes, I also read section 11.4, but in this case that may not be sufficient language to justify "invalidating" the juristiction question. I don't see U.S. courts enforcing civil action against U.S. citizens that was done in a French court, particularly when the alleged infringement took place on American soil. In other words, knock your socks off and sue for millions of dollars against an American, but you couldn't collect a dime even if you won in court. It would just have the effect of placing a legal ban on that person from ever coming to France (which most Americans wouldn't care about anyway).
How I could see U.S. common law interpreting this, assuming that it declares this license to be invalid, is to consider more along the lines of intent rather than actual prohibition. An "enlightened" judge might presume the terms of the GPL as an alternate, but more likely consider that the software was place into "Public Domain", and follow existing U.S. common law regarding its copyright status at that point. At least the GPL has a provision that if the license is unenforceable, then the license is revoked at it reverts to standard copyright terms, which would otherwise mean it simply can't be redistributed. I don't see this provision at all.
I'm not too comfortable with Section 5.3.4 either. It mentions almost in passing that this license can be superceeded by the GPL under some circumstances. The Gnu Public License is not otherwise defined (Is that the General-microsoft Propritary License instead?) and while most/. geeks understand what you are talking about with the GPL, I can't same the same for most lawyers or especially judges. It doesn't even specify which GPL license, the Free Software Foundation, or which version (the new version 4 of the GPL that gives all copyright to RMS and forces you to pay him (Mr. Stallman) $1 for each time the software product is running?) It doesn't even deal with GPL varients like LGPL or FDPL, not to mention if other free software source code gets mixed in with this license, like BSD-link licenses.
From a developer perspective, I would avoid software that is released under the CeCILL like it was some diseased, virus infected piece of software. I wouldn't even want to open the software to examine its internal workings, for fear of "contamination". That is the real point of going through this exercise, is that this group wants to have their license widely distributed, or at least have their software adoped widely with this license.
Ultimately, this is another case of "Don't try this at home". RMS took quite a bit of time trying to come up with the GPL, and even he got it wrong the first time. Writing an open source license that grants freedom to copy but preserves copyright is not a trivial thing. In addition, the writing process of an open license can't be done in a traditional committee, but the process must also be open and subject to change if the community finds holes in the license. I just don't see the CeCILL having gone through that process, particuarly with the holes mentioned here.
It is almost sad to think of how that name has been abused. I have specifically not contributed to H2G2 in part because of the copyright of what gets contributed. The Wiki* heirarchy (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikitionary, etc.) is released under the GFDL and the content is owned by the original author. In theory you can take one of your books, and as long as it is your own content you can re-release it under other licenses, just like you can do with GPL'd software. This is not the case with H2G2.
Originally it had quite a bit more brashness, and had content that went all over the place. It looks like it has degerated into a cute plaything for the BBC, which BTW owns the copyright for everything in H2G2 right now. The Old URL still resolves into this current site, and if anybody on/. knows the history of what happened over the past couple of years post dot bomb collapse, I would be interested. H2G2 also had quite a bit more content than Wikipedia originally, primarily because they had a jump start over Wikipedia.
I was having problems with the police back in the 1980's. I can't even imagine what would happen now.
One instance I know of was when a couple of kids in our "Assassin" group put on ski masks and had a shoot-out in a local mall. One of the shop owners called in the police, thinking we had just "killed" one of the other members of the group. The police were actually clueful enough to track down who the game admin was (a close friend of mine), and quitely had the game shut down without making it onto the evening news.
Routinely we would have "shootouts" during the break between classes at school. Somehow I doubt that even a Supersoaker would get clearance today, because of similarities as a "weapon", or worse yet, it could have some sort of "biological" agent. I prefered a small cap gun that fired off rubber bullets. I know that would have been confiscated today by most police liason officiers, even before you got into the building. I even remember "concealing" the gun in an old book that we bought in a thrift store, by glueing the pages together and cutting out a hole in the pages for the shape of the gun. We left a few pages unglued so it could even be "read" if you were forced into using it as a book.
Still, it is a fun game, and under a more controlled environment it still might be fun.
Re:Recording wind sound on Mars
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Saturn Hailstorm
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· Score: 1
Considering how trivial it is to get a microphone into an intrument package, and how comparatively small PCM data alone could be, I'm curious why this didn't make it onto the Mars Rover project?
I know that it would have taken a little bit more power, space, etc., so maybe that answers the question. Still, it would be nice.
I guess that on the next launch window to Mars it will be going, this time with the French.
I also want to add, as has been mentioned on/. several times before, that it is very difficult to find a $1 Billion niche in the software industry. Sure, you can find several $1 Million niches, and perhaps that is what Microsoft should be heading toward, and they are to a certain extent.
Also, when you are a large company like Microsoft, especially one that has the founder and chairman of the board still running around and attending meetings for major projects, it makes it so that only very large projects are ever going to be made. "Pet" projects can also be made by department managers and senior vice presidents, but you aren't going to see any real innovation from the ordinary grunts, because they really aren't paid to do that.
BTW, what I've said applies also to almost all other large companies. Smaller companies are not immune to this either, where the top leadership of a company with only five employees still aren't listening to the grunts who are doing the work, but those companies tend to fold up very quickly.
Large companies are large because they have figured out how to exploit a business niche that has lots of room for growth. Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Ford, General Motors, Boeing, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Time-Warner are all examples of very large companies in the USA that you could also point to a dominent product line. Yes, every single one of those companies also does business in things not quite related to their #1 product or general product line, but the thing they do best is what they are also best noted for. I'm not sure I'd buy a Microsoft hamburger, or a Coca-Cola automobile. This should also show why the merger between AOL and Time-Warner was such a huge mistake.
I have no doubt that Microsoft will still be making computer operating systems in some form or another 100 years from now. Another thing they also do very well is writing compilers. What kills both their compilers and operating systems is that they get mucked up with garbage to help their other product lines like games and unfortunately their office suites.
If anybody from Microsoft is reading this, here is how I would do things different "If I were King"(tm), or in other words, if I were CEO of Microsoft:
Set up a "venture capital" fund as Microsoft for their own employees to propose wild ideas. Some more bizzare than others. They still have to make very reasonable business plans to show that they can pull off the concept, and show they have the talents or can find the talents of people that could do it.
Encourage these employees by giving the "seed" money to get this project going. Set it up like a mini corporation itself, or perhaps even go through the whole mess of formal legal incorporation. It doesn't matter here, but the point is that Microsoft is risking its money and gets a cut in the profits from this new venture. The new employees of this group also get a huge stake...not in Microsoft in general (although that could be done as well), but specifically in this new division or "company". Let this group go for it, and then cut the umbillical cord very early forcing this new group to sink or swim. If it goes under, they lose their jobs, or at least have to reapply at Microsoft somewhere else. If the company succeeds, they will have made $$$$$ for Microsoft as well as themselves. Don't screw up the internal auditing process by charging stuff to this new division that doesn't really belong there, nor to force this new comany to only buy tools or devices from within the Microsoft framework of companies. Don't even worry if it competes against another product line of Microsoft. That is the point, they should be able to duke it out on their own.
One thing I see lacking for most software startups is a serious lack of money. That is one thing that Microsoft has in abundance, and even if only 10% of these venture business succeeded, it would still be a profitable business concept for MS.
I feel for the project leader. He is simply saying that he doesn't want to carry the torch any more. Period. It doesn't really matter what the reason is, although I can also understand what he is saying regarding crypto stuff having a bunch of really weird issues that should never be in the realm of Computer Science.
Part of that is because we are talking about national governments trying to control information flow (notably the U.S. government), and litterally thousands of patents that control who can do what and when with the algorithms. Of all areas of CS, this is perhaps the most litigated subject and has the most restrictions of free speech when discussing this topic. It really is a mine field of trying to know what you can get, and trying to get people who are in the know to spill the beans about what is occuring as well. If patents don't get you, then government security agencies will.
As far as lies are concerned, there is deliberate mis-information going on as well with this branch of computer science. Those are the lies he is talking about. Normally with trying to get computer equipment working, it is so difficult to figure out what is working and what isn't, that you simply presume that the written documentation has mistakes like the wrong pin number or an error code that is one or two numbers off. If documentation is deliberately obfusated to even include mathmatical formulas that are close, but don't really work, or sample code that has intentional holes, you are going to be really lost. Much of this is intentional, on the part of national governments. Some is also due to competitors who are trying to throw potential rivals off from each other. There are "honest" people involved as well, and the trick is trying to know who is your friend and who doesn't really care.
Technological comapnies have had a boom/bust cycle since the 1940s with the Manhattan Project taking most talented engineers and then dumping them once "the bomb" was developed. This was also repeated in the 1960's with Apollo program sucking up Electrical Engineers like there was no tomorrow (together with mechanical and in some cases civil engineers as well) then with the cancellation of Apollo 18 the whole situation collapsed.
Go back and read what the employment situation was like for Electrical Engineers back in the 1970s was like. I heard figures close to 50% unemployment for E.E.s during at least part of the '70s. What this did was set the stage for massive entrepreneurial growth, because suddenly massive amount of highly trained talent was available to move into new directions rather than being consumed by these massive projects.
Right now I see the same sort of thing happening in the software industry, where college CS graduates are being "bought" for cheap and there is quite a bit of entrepreneurial activity to start the next wave of software companies. It won't be the companies that you are familiar with, or even writing the kinds of software that has been written before. It has been done before, which is why it won't be done.
There are a lot of companies right now that are working "under the radar", that aren't a part of that 600 that will be doing the mega mergers. One problem, however, with all of this merger, fallout, and new company cycle is that software developers are kinda out in the cold as they get older, and glowing pension plans and 401K plans mean next to nothing when you really think about it. What this means when large numbers of software developers start to go grey remains to be seen.
Look, I'm not trying to say that NASA should be participating in "corporate welfare" activities that give everything away to corporate interests, although it could be argued that the net effect of what NASA has been doing over the past 20 years is precicely that. I really scratch my head with the "United Space Alliance" group that is currently running the Space Shuttle program, where essentially NASA has given away the space shuttles to private companies. When STS-1 was launched, most of the personnel at KSC were NASA personnel or manufacturing representitives of the components that went into the shuttle. Most of the people there now are either employees of "USA" (notice what they did with the name of their company) with only a very small handful of actual NASA employees.
Basically, this is the worst of all worlds, because you have this big fat company litterally collecting billions of tax dollars for their shareholders that is supposedly a "private space transportation company" but have little to no incentive to branch beyond simply servicing the basic requirements that NASA asks for. Also, as a NASA contractor they simply can't fire up the shuttle on their own and throw something into space whenever they want, they still have to get permission from Congress each time it goes up. You want to talk about a political process, and that is just to send a single crew into space.
If that is giving away the "people's enterprise", I'm sorry, but it's already been done, and done poorly at that.
I really like the direction that the FAA/AST has been going, and they are not just premissive of the X-Prize, but very enthusiastic to help out. They even hand-delivered the launch certification for Space Ship One (although I don't expect that in the future.) For a government bureaucracy, they really aren't too bad as they are still small enough to at least match the current private space launch industry at the moment.
It would have been telling if Eisenhower would have offered an X-Prize like goal for private enterprise to build spaceships instead of the government program that became NASA. There had been a tradition of aviation prizes, although government sponsored prizes are still controvercial. It also would have outlined a clear difference between an American approach vs. following the "commies" into space.
But that is sour grapes. All I can say is that we now know quite a bit for how to travel in space, and that research is really going to save lives, regardless for what private individuals are going to be doing in the future.
While this is an interesting idea, I have yet to see a single instance of community pressure to get the/. staff to do anything. Their main comment:
If you don't like it, make your own site and do what you want. This is our site, so buzz off if you don't like it.
Or something to that effect. I like/., and there are some good community-building features here, but response to the community, particularly in the message forums, is practically nil (or NULL, depending on your language).
All that happens, at best, when you complain about it is that you lose karma. I got karma to burn, so I don't care. That is why I'm joining you in the complaing, but being very apethetic regaring if it will make any difference.
While I will agree with you that a considerable amount of space research has paved the way for the current "boom" of space-based enterprises, the U.S. government hasn't exactly been all that cooperative in dealing with entrepreneurs who want to do things in space.
For the most part, all NASA cared to do was encourage "private business" to be a parts source for their pet projects. Primarily from aircraft companies who were renamed "aerospace", but there was always much more air than space for all of them. NASA astronauts were considered "elite" specialists and mere mortals should never consider even applying to become an astronaut. A minimum of a PhD and 1000 hours of flying multi-engine jet FAA certification minimum. All astronauts are eventually certified to fly the shuttle, even if it is not their primary job classification. The idea is mainly to have emergency backups just in case something happens to the pilot. And that is just the folks that go into space (Senator Jake Garn not withstanding, and even he had over 1000 hours of multi-engine FAA certification... Senator John Glenn... well, he was a test pilot at one time, you know?)
I know of at least two commercial groups that went to Rockwell International (back when they existed) and begged to buy a shuttle. They had the financing already lined up, and by that time the shuttle was FAA certified for spaceflight. NASA came in and said "No!", especially because there was no "civilian" oversight agency to approve such a flight. Had this one act been approved, rather than having 3 questionable shuttles they would have had a dozen or more, and made the ground crew at KSC really worth their mettle and expense. It would have been cheaper to fly shuttle missions, and the Shuttle program would have actually meant something.
In addition, back in the early days of the Shuttle program, was proposing all sorts of private development efforts to use cargo capacity of the Shuttle. Indeed, this was one of the major selling points to congress, that finally private enterprise could get into space, which was something that the Apollo program simply could never afford the opportunity to do. There was even proposals for "space tourists" in a specially developed passenger module that would fit in the back of the Shuttle. Estimates for as many as 20 additional passengers on the shuttle could be accomodated. Additional commercial access was supposedly offered through the G.A.S. (Get-Away Special) cans, where for a certain fee any private citizen could "rent" the space and put anything in it that you wanted to fly into space. I think a couple of companies did eventually do this, but very soon it was restricted to bona-fide research companies or universities (especially post-Challenger). A friend of mine that still has ties to the Utah State/Space Dynamics Lab has said to me that the G.A.S. program has been totally canceled now. There will be no more programs like that going into space. Period. On an unmanned rocket, perhaps, and that is what is keeping the SDL going right now. On Space Ship One? One can only hope.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that NASA has indeed be a major obsticle to allowing commercial development in space. The Administration for Space Transportation (AST... they've changed their name a couple of times too but they are still called the AST) is finally starting to change the government perception of what should and should not go into space. Let's see what happens when John Carmack sends in his application. BTW, he is preparing to do a major test this week or next, so stay tuned to/. for further details.
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The truth here is that so much money was getting tossed around at the time for rocketry that it was often a "Flavor of the Month(tm)" for names and designs. The reason why it was called Jupiter was because it was supposed to succeed the Saturn-class vehicles in terms of size.
The real reason they weren't use, like you mentioned, is that it wasn't really needed. Manufacturing facilities may have also been limited, but I seriously think that was not a major issue at the time. The Apollo project was in many ways like Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, or even the Great Pyramid in Giza in terms of manpower and resources devoted to getting it to work. It touched just about every single high-tech industry. I remember "putting on" the helmets used for Apollo 16, and that was with a very minor company that was only a sub-sub-sub contractor.
The number of people working for either NASA, related Air Force projects, or NASA contractors numbered in the millions, and represented more than 15% of the Federal Government in terms of spending... at one point getting very close to Defense spending in terms of the amount of money going out the door. And that was during the middle of a war in the USA (Vietnam). This is why I doubt having a factory to build the things was a problem, because a whole new factory would have been built from scratch had it really been needed. Virtually a blank check to get the rocket to the moon.
To talk about specialized facilities, I would say that the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC is about as specialized as they come. It was built for the Apollo Program (not the Shuttles... although it was modified for the Shuttle program later). This is also where I was trying to point out that much larger rockets were intended to be built there. Not much additional work was done to accomodate the space shuttles, because it was built to deal with much wider rockets, like the full Shuttle and launch pad. Even the Saturn V had ample clearance above the Launch Escape tower, and the crane inside the building could handle a rocket about 100 feet higher.
Other facilities were also added to KSC to deal with the larger rockets, so it is obvious that at least at one point much larger rockets were intended to be launched from KSC.
BTW, thanks for the links to the Nova rockets. Seeing a Saturn V get dwarfed by the other rocket designs really gives a good scale to things. The Saturn V was really a 30-story sky scraper that was intended to fly, and those other vehicles just make me think more of trying to get the Chrysler Building into orbit.
I think what is happening with nuclear energy is that a generation of kids are (hopefully) being taught about nuclear physics by instructors that really know what is going on. It has been several generations now since nuclear reactors have been common place for power generation and running ships in the Navy. The reactors (except for Chernobyl and Three-Mile-Island) havn't had any serious accidents, and even the accidents that have occured was due to sloppy engineering that new reactors don't have to worry about if done correctly.
I also believe that radiation is no longer the big boogy man that it once was, where people would get worried if there is any radiation of any kind. Standing in sunshine and going for a walk will give you exposure to some forms of radiation that, while of the lethal variety, are low enough power that it won't do you any harm besides what has happened for millions of years. Many people are comfortable with microwave ovens (I know, a different radiation kind compared to gamma rays, but ordinary folks don't know the difference) and they use radioactive isotopes in their smoke alarms. These everyday uses in particular bring nuclear technology down to something that an ordinary person can grasp.
There still are hard-core anti-nuclear activists, but often their arguments are so off the wall that they don't get any respect and are perceived more as Luddites rather than having some legitimate gripes about the use of nuclear technology.
What is really interesting is that back in the 1960's NASA had plans for an even bigger rocket than the Saturn V. I think it was called the Jupiter rocket or something like that. About 5x-10x the lift capacity of the Saturn V.
KSC in Florida was actually built to accomodate that rocket, which could only be shipped from the manufacturing facility by barge, because there was no other known form of tranportation was (or for that matter is) capable of transporting a rocket engine that big over larger distances. It was a nightmare just to get the Saturn V to Huntsville, AL. I can't imagine a larger rocket going down the road for 500 miles.
What killed the Jupiter project was that the Saturn V proved capable of sending the lunar equipment up, and Apollo didn't need anything more powerful. Contrasting that to the Russian lunar rocket that blew up on the launch pad in July of 1969, and it goes to show just how incredible the Saturn V rocket really was. And yes, Russia really was that close to getting somebody on the moon before the Americans. After Apollo 11 they (the USSR) pretended that it was never a project goal to get to the moon.
The nice thing about Montana is that it is a huge state with low population. It is one of the few western states, and the only small (population) western state, to lose representation in the U.S. House or Representatives in the past 30 years.
I would recommend Utah or Nevada as equal candidates, and there are plenty of nuts in these two states as well, but it is starting to get a little crowded there, with the growing population centers of Las Vegas, Reno, and Salt Lake City (St. George could almost be considered a suburb of Las Vegas now.) North Dakota is also a nice spot to get away from just about anybody who is getting in your face.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having Bobby Fischer as a neighbor, and compared to some of my neighbors, he might just fit in too, even with his anti-governmnet attitudes (or even because of them). The problem is that strong-arm police have come here, so it wouldn't solve any of his problems, especially considering how outspoken he is. I'd love to have him for a visit, but I'd have to tell him to move along rather quickly, and that is unfortunate.
While Bobby Fischer might have technically violated some U.S. laws, (and this one technicality is just the first that he has dealt with) he really should simply be left alone.
I've been following Bobby Fischer since he started publishing Chess columns in Boys' Life. While not necessarily a hacker, certainly a classic geek.
He all but dropped out of society in almost a Ted Kaczynski fashion, and can IMHO be classified as the most persecuted American by the U.S. Government. He was also wanted a few years ago on tax evasion charges, but I thought that got cleared up. He really has been hounded by the U.S. government for many things, and gone through ups and downs in his life that I would not wish on anybody.
A really good writeup about Bobby Fischer's trip to Yugoslavia is on bobbyfischer.net
I had to use the internet wayback machine because for some reason the regular website is down. Probably due to some slashdotting, although in this case probably not directly due to slashdot it self (surprisingly). Some absolutely incredible articles. I've also seen segments on television news programs that have also discussed his life, and it seems rather pathetic. How much of this is brought onto himself, and how much is out right presecution remains to be debated, but he should really be given a nice quite spot in Montana and be left alone.
Maybe the U.S. government is afraid of letting intelligent people who think the U.S. government is screwed up be left alone.
The problems with cloud seeding are huge, and yes, I will admit that we don't totally understand the dynamics of what makes rain. We do have a pretty good idea, and some very good theories, so when you propose something fantastic and from left field away from the current theories, you must have some incredible evidence as well. Raw speculation simply won't cut it, and we are talking raw basic science here. This is how scientific theories form.
/.) that perhaps we should use nukes to stop hurricanes. I really am not kidding either, and these were serious proposals that even made it to congress (like they know science as well). The weather forecasting community litterally started to laugh until they realized how serious the proposal was. The point is that the entire nuclear arsenal of the USA, simultaneously detonated, could only at most divert a Hurricane by a few miles. It couldn't possibly stop it because by itself has more power than all of those nukes combined. That is totally ignoring the radiation effects of such an action.
There are incredible amounts of energy that are released in storms, and in particular clouds have to be heavily saturated and ready as well in order to rain. Cloud seeding is attempting to bypass the normal weather mechanisms and cause a cloud to rain when normally it wouldn't.
For example, some people suggested (even here on
Do you really think that one small plane with a few drops of iodine or other mineral would really make that much difference? You might make a huge difference if you "seed" a few miles before it normally would, or increase the amount of rainfall by about 1%. The questions then would be: How can you tell if it made a difference? Is it really worth the money when you can obtain more water elsewhere? Is this preventing rainfall in areas that really need this water? What other climtological effects does rain seeding do?
There are some very competent scientists working on weather forecasting and study of the physics of weather. Except for the Global Warming issues, there really isn't that much that is controversial regarding what they do, and they don't really get paid that much either, unless they are working for a major market television station. Put away your tin hat and read what real scientist are saying about this topic. If you study this in detail and can prove organic production of clouds, including going up in a Cessna. It wouldn't be hard, and you can even keep the airspeed rather low. Even a sail plane would work if you wanted to make sure that engine noise and exaust would keep bacteria away. If you capture relatively large numbers of organic lifeforms in clouds, and can prove that the clouds themselves form nurseries for these organic lifeforms, I might be considerably more impressed.
Lifeforms in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter would be the next place to look if you can even identify lifeforms that spend most of their lifetimes in clouds themselves. You might even get a NASA grant if you can show even preliminary results for something like this.
Actually, I like that approach for the GPL. I will also openly admit that I was using the GPL as an EULA because I was using a quick & dirty install script that included a space for an EULA, and I didn't want to have to rewrite the logic of that script to make the logic like you said above, or cause the script to crash when I took that "screen" or "page" out of the installation. It was simply easier to throw something into the EULA.
As far as Windows XP: I have a copy of it, and I used it for about 4 months. My computer got corrupted due to something that Microsoft "automatically" downloaded onto my computer to fix some security feature or another. I went and totally wiped my hard drive, Reformatted, and moved to Windows 2000 Pro, which I also had. I also swore that Win2K was going to be the final Microsoft operating system I would ever use. Kinda sucks in some ways, because I've spent several years learning the Win32 API library and diving down into rather basic features of Windows. Now I need to find a new OS to replace Win2K.
I'm strongly leaning toward ReactOS, and I'm hoping that it will be strong enough when the plug finally gets pulled on Win2K. I won't even try Longhorn when it comes out.
How absolutely sure are you that bacterial life is not in the upper atmosphere?
I've heard of bacterial capture as high as 50,000 feet. Do you mean higher than that? Like the 100 km altitude that Space Ship One went to?
And the same about Antarctica. How absolutely sure are you that you can't find some sort of bacterial remains or transport of some kind that can litterally be found in the middle of Antarctica? That is even ignoring the Antarctic research stations where I'm sure you can find bacteria in abundance. I've seen bacterial growth on alpine glaciers high on mountain tops, that live in conditions that are very similar to Antarctica. Antarctica is a big place, and to totally rule out anything living there is just too absolute.
Also, if you think boiling something for a few minutes in water at 100 C is going to kill bacteria, you really don't understand food science at all. What that normally does when you cook is kill bacteria and other organisms that are harmful to people. An autoclave does a much better job, but that is not normally something you would stick a chicken sandwich into.
One reason why it is suspected that bacteria could survive in space is because of Apollo-12, where the Surveyor probe, launched several years earlier, was "accidentally" contaminated before it was launched. Parts of this space probe were returned back to Earth in sealed bags, and it was detected that several bacterial cells survived not only the spaceflight to the moon, but "lived" on the moon for several years before coming back to the laboratories on the Earth. Nobody is claiming that they thrived and multiplied into huge numbers on the Moon, but they were able to survive and when put into a much more hospitable environment (like a petri dish full of agar in an Earth-based lab) they did thrive and begin to reproduce again.
Also, micrometeorites that are the size of a pin-head or even somewhat larger have been known to survive reentry without burning up from re-entry. It is not that difficult to bring things to the Earth that could survive, and certainly something the size of a bacterium could enter the Earth's atmosphere without heating up to several thousands of degrees C.
The only reason reentry is so difficult for spaceflight is because it is a cheap and easy way to reduce speed without having to fire rockets to reduce velocity for a safe landing. This has no relationship to small grains of sand that are orbiting the sun. Even a large rock will only get heated so much coming into the Earth's atmosphere, simply because the entry won't last that long. A very hard landing, but relatively quick transit time through the atmosphere. How many G's of force do you think a bacteria could take? I bet it is quite a bit more than a person could take, by about 1000x.
I have no doubt that you can find some sort of carbon-based cellular life in any environment that has at least some form of water, from the bottom of an ocean trench to the pressurized interior of gysers (sometimes over 300 C), and yes, even in clouds.
What I don't accept is that clouds themselves are a product of bacterial colonies other than as a by-product from releaseing water vapor from inside their cellular structures. Water clouds would form even if the Earth were sterile of life.
You can also find organic shapes from lava flows, like from Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Lava can even form pillowing structures and rounded shapes, and that is just a simple non-organic chemical process, just like you have suggested. Look at some pictures of Io (the moon of Jupiter) to see some other "organic" structures that are clearly from chemical processes. While living things may be on Mars, I seriously doubt any living thing could survive the extreamly hostile conditions on Io, both from extreame heat/cold conditions, the "atmospheric" conditions there, the fact that it sits in the middle of Jupiter's Van Allen Belt (radiation like you wouldn't believe) and other life threating issues. Europa has just enough "heat" getting pumped into it that it can melt water, which is why Europa is considered an even higher candidate right now for Extra-terrestial life in our solar system.
I think some clouds are occasionally found on Mars (getting this back on topic), and that by itself is certainly not proof of life on Mars. Ammonia, methane, and free oxygen are all much larger signs of life because all of these compounds (yes, O2 is a compound) are easily lost to space or consumed very quickly through chemical processes for it to have been sitting there for the past 4 1/2 billion years that is estimated our Solar System has for its age since it left the primordial stellar nursery. All of these compounds are found in abundance in the atmosphere on the Earth, in part because living things are also found in abundance. If you don't think ammonia is that common, you havn't walked past a manure pile lately.
But if you do production in an open shop state, or set up your production company from the beginning to be union-free, why worry about union rules?
IMHO this is one thing that is killing Hollywood as a cinema production center. Labor unions and guilds do have their place, and companies that abuse their workers do deserve the unions they get. Still, if you are offering professional wages for professional work, union rules really don't matter and you can produce whatever you wanted to make.
What caused the problems here was the heavy consolidation of movie production into a very small handful of companies, so it forced the creation of labor unions to combat the management pressures put on the ordinary film production crew members. "A" list movie actors were never an issue here, nor were top script writers. The next tier down, however, did start to suffer due to studio pressure to lower wages, and it got worse for those trying to break into the industry.
The "awsome" thing about open-source scripts and even film scenes is that you can add to the "body" of what has been produced, and start this with a relatively small budget... just a couple of kids struggling with a camcorder and a digital editing system in their basement. The most famous example of what can be produced in a manner like this is THX-1138 a film produced by George Lucas (aka Star Wars) when he was a student at the USC film school. Of course Blair Witch Project can also be compared this way, but it really was produced by some slightly more experienced folks... just for a cheap budget.
I've seen plenty of fan flicks, some of fairly decent quality. Why not extend this idea some more?
I understand what you are saying here, but I don't think you understand how an American judge would view this. If you want to understand that software covered under this license is going to be released in France, I understand.
.fr, I discover that it is released using the CeCILL license.
/., I certainly hope that copyright for this original set of words is still valid in France. I certainly would enforce violations of the GPL to my software in France. Why not expect the same to happen to me here in America for some French software?
I just see that software doesn't know boundaries, and software using this license will somehow or another make it to the U.S.A. When it does, American copyright law will take over, as modified by copyright treaties (notably Bern) and agreements between the French and U.S. governments. Ultimately also the U.S. constitution, but let's leave that out of the equation for the moment.
I have a piece of software that was written in France. For example, quite a bit of multimedia software is developed in France that is of quite high quality, some of it even released as an open source software product.
When this software comes into my hands somehow, I look at it, run the software, it does just what I want to do to accomplish some computing/software task, so I want to add it to my own piece of software, possibly even another open source project. That is the whole point of open source/free software anyway.
As I read through the documentation that I downloaded from a website ending in
At this point I'll have to yell "DAMN!" and throw it away, because it has the same value as if it had some from some secret Microsoft developer's FTP site for some project kept under wraps by that software company. Or worse yet some code actually written by SCO. (All 10 lines of it.:)
This is because the license does indeed apply to me, and I need to know under what terms I can copy the software and use it. It makes no difference if I am a citizen or resident of France, U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, Ghana, Japan, China, or Pitcrin Island. The license still applies to me. If the license terms spell out that in a juristiction out side of France it reverts to standard Gnu Public License Verion 2 or later, then it should spell out those terms explicitly or I am bound by both French and American law to honor the terms as specified. The CeCILL license as I read it does no such thing. It doesn't even spell out what GPL means, much less say when the GPL goes into effect.
I am saying that there are some legal holes that if you wanted to enforce copyright in the U.S.A. with this software license (I.E. not let Microsoft incorporate it into the next version of Windows Longhorn, without attribution or without even letting you know about some potential flaws in the software you didn't know about, and without source code for anybody that gets the new version of M$ software), it simply won't work. That is fine if you want to simply say that outside of France this software is in the public domain. I don't think that is the goal of this software license, however, or is it?
The other possible outcome is that there is no license to use any software written under the CeCILL license outside of France. If the software is written using this software license, it is illegal for you to even possess it outside of France. That is one thing copyright can do, and is a monopoly that is absolute in the eyes of the law. Certainly no software could be copied outside of France under these terms. This makes it in some ways even worse than propritary software.
Which outcome do you think it should be? You mean to tell me that when you write anything in France (or where ever you live...I know you said you don't live in France), you don't want copyright protection in the USA? For every software project, or even prose like this comment on
As I said earlier, this license is full of holes, and it needs to be understood and read for how it
I'm sorry if you are such a stinking America hater, but that is just too bad.
Of course this was U.S.-centric. I am an American. The parent poster was asking about legal issues in juristictions outside of France, and I gave a U.S. perspective.
I will not develop any code with this license. Period. I stated exactly why, and some specific objections as to why this would not hold up in U.S. courts. I didn't say about what other countries might do with this license, but I would suspect that the net result is pretty much the same.
As far as being superceded by the GPL, it really doesn't cover explicitly what GPL license it is really covering, and in a legal case that is a huge loophole. I don't read that outside of a French juristiction that it may revert to the GPL. It doesn't even say explicitly what the GPL means, other than something related to software called the GPL might be used if you happened to use some additional software and somehow modify the code. Particularly because there was a fairly large definition section, I would expect the GPL to also be explicitly defined in a legal sense. That definition is not there. That is why I suggested the General Party Lounge instead (or was that Gekko Policy Limitations?)
I also don't care what RMS had to say about its applicability. He was wrong if he things it will revert to the GPL as written. This license needs quite a bit more work in order for it to really work as a good open-source license. That was my big complaint.
The point of a supersoaker was for an ambush only. It would be the equivalent of getting gunned down by a Tommy Gun. Sure, it was very brazen, but the rules of the games I was playing didn't specifically prohibit a supersoaker, just that like you said, it was so big that usually it wouldn't be used.
Generally a supersoaker isn't considered a firearm in the usual sense, and if a police officer caught you with one it is less likely that they would draw their own firearm on you. Some of the smaller squirt guns and other "missile" launchers could be mistaken for a firearm, so you might just end up dead by the hands of a cop by mistake if you used them. It still wouldn't be good to hit an on-duty police officer with a supersoaker, however.
I know this is a late question and probably won't get modded up, but I'll ask it anyway:
What lead to the demise of Nupedia? What is wrong with a set of peer-reviewed articles instead of the free-for-all that Wikipedia as turned into? Can a more scholarly version of Wikipedia ever succeed? (I.E. something more like Nupedia where you have to somehow demonstrate knowledge of a particular topic first.)
While I can find info about this elsewhere, I would like to get Jimmy Wales' perspective of this, particularly with his ties to Nupedia in the past.
I've written a couple of installation shells for GPL'd software, and I've put the GPL in the place of the EULA simply as a "in your face" to the installation script when it wants you to put something in there regarding licensing terms.
I actually find seeing the GPL as an EULA as refreshing, precisely due to what you said. You don't have to accept the license, and indeed you could put text on the buttons "Who cares" and "Doesn't matter". With people so used to draconian license terms from traditional Windows software, why not have the GPL as another licensing agreement to have to look through? Technically not exactly accurate, but who really reads the things anyway?
In theory, you might also be able to haul them to New Oreleans and sue under Louisiana law (they still use Nepolianic Code in that state). Interestingly, lawyers from Louisana are the only American attornies who can practice law in France.
/. geeks understand what you are talking about with the GPL, I can't same the same for most lawyers or especially judges. It doesn't even specify which GPL license, the Free Software Foundation, or which version (the new version 4 of the GPL that gives all copyright to RMS and forces you to pay him (Mr. Stallman) $1 for each time the software product is running?) It doesn't even deal with GPL varients like LGPL or FDPL, not to mention if other free software source code gets mixed in with this license, like BSD-link licenses.
This is a huge hole, and I'm not even sure it would hold up in U.S. courts... as in if an American modified software using this this license, would the license even be recognized at all by U.S. Courts? As in would this license even be held to be recognized in a U.S. Court, or would this provision throw the whole license out and invalidate the entire license?
Yes, I also read section 11.4, but in this case that may not be sufficient language to justify "invalidating" the juristiction question. I don't see U.S. courts enforcing civil action against U.S. citizens that was done in a French court, particularly when the alleged infringement took place on American soil. In other words, knock your socks off and sue for millions of dollars against an American, but you couldn't collect a dime even if you won in court. It would just have the effect of placing a legal ban on that person from ever coming to France (which most Americans wouldn't care about anyway).
How I could see U.S. common law interpreting this, assuming that it declares this license to be invalid, is to consider more along the lines of intent rather than actual prohibition. An "enlightened" judge might presume the terms of the GPL as an alternate, but more likely consider that the software was place into "Public Domain", and follow existing U.S. common law regarding its copyright status at that point. At least the GPL has a provision that if the license is unenforceable, then the license is revoked at it reverts to standard copyright terms, which would otherwise mean it simply can't be redistributed. I don't see this provision at all.
I'm not too comfortable with Section 5.3.4 either. It mentions almost in passing that this license can be superceeded by the GPL under some circumstances. The Gnu Public License is not otherwise defined (Is that the General-microsoft Propritary License instead?) and while most
From a developer perspective, I would avoid software that is released under the CeCILL like it was some diseased, virus infected piece of software. I wouldn't even want to open the software to examine its internal workings, for fear of "contamination". That is the real point of going through this exercise, is that this group wants to have their license widely distributed, or at least have their software adoped widely with this license.
Ultimately, this is another case of "Don't try this at home". RMS took quite a bit of time trying to come up with the GPL, and even he got it wrong the first time. Writing an open source license that grants freedom to copy but preserves copyright is not a trivial thing. In addition, the writing process of an open license can't be done in a traditional committee, but the process must also be open and subject to change if the community finds holes in the license. I just don't see the CeCILL having gone through that process, particuarly with the holes mentioned here.
Do you mean like this?
/. knows the history of what happened over the past couple of years post dot bomb collapse, I would be interested. H2G2 also had quite a bit more content than Wikipedia originally, primarily because they had a jump start over Wikipedia.
It is almost sad to think of how that name has been abused. I have specifically not contributed to H2G2 in part because of the copyright of what gets contributed. The Wiki* heirarchy (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikitionary, etc.) is released under the GFDL and the content is owned by the original author. In theory you can take one of your books, and as long as it is your own content you can re-release it under other licenses, just like you can do with GPL'd software. This is not the case with H2G2.
Originally it had quite a bit more brashness, and had content that went all over the place. It looks like it has degerated into a cute plaything for the BBC, which BTW owns the copyright for everything in H2G2 right now. The Old URL still resolves into this current site, and if anybody on
No kidding.
I was having problems with the police back in the 1980's. I can't even imagine what would happen now.
One instance I know of was when a couple of kids in our "Assassin" group put on ski masks and had a shoot-out in a local mall. One of the shop owners called in the police, thinking we had just "killed" one of the other members of the group. The police were actually clueful enough to track down who the game admin was (a close friend of mine), and quitely had the game shut down without making it onto the evening news.
Routinely we would have "shootouts" during the break between classes at school. Somehow I doubt that even a Supersoaker would get clearance today, because of similarities as a "weapon", or worse yet, it could have some sort of "biological" agent. I prefered a small cap gun that fired off rubber bullets. I know that would have been confiscated today by most police liason officiers, even before you got into the building. I even remember "concealing" the gun in an old book that we bought in a thrift store, by glueing the pages together and cutting out a hole in the pages for the shape of the gun. We left a few pages unglued so it could even be "read" if you were forced into using it as a book.
Still, it is a fun game, and under a more controlled environment it still might be fun.
Considering how trivial it is to get a microphone into an intrument package, and how comparatively small PCM data alone could be, I'm curious why this didn't make it onto the Mars Rover project?
I know that it would have taken a little bit more power, space, etc., so maybe that answers the question. Still, it would be nice.
I guess that on the next launch window to Mars it will be going, this time with the French.
I also want to add, as has been mentioned on /. several times before, that it is very difficult to find a $1 Billion niche in the software industry. Sure, you can find several $1 Million niches, and perhaps that is what Microsoft should be heading toward, and they are to a certain extent.
Also, when you are a large company like Microsoft, especially one that has the founder and chairman of the board still running around and attending meetings for major projects, it makes it so that only very large projects are ever going to be made. "Pet" projects can also be made by department managers and senior vice presidents, but you aren't going to see any real innovation from the ordinary grunts, because they really aren't paid to do that.
BTW, what I've said applies also to almost all other large companies. Smaller companies are not immune to this either, where the top leadership of a company with only five employees still aren't listening to the grunts who are doing the work, but those companies tend to fold up very quickly.
Large companies are large because they have figured out how to exploit a business niche that has lots of room for growth. Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Ford, General Motors, Boeing, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Time-Warner are all examples of very large companies in the USA that you could also point to a dominent product line. Yes, every single one of those companies also does business in things not quite related to their #1 product or general product line, but the thing they do best is what they are also best noted for. I'm not sure I'd buy a Microsoft hamburger, or a Coca-Cola automobile. This should also show why the merger between AOL and Time-Warner was such a huge mistake.
I have no doubt that Microsoft will still be making computer operating systems in some form or another 100 years from now. Another thing they also do very well is writing compilers. What kills both their compilers and operating systems is that they get mucked up with garbage to help their other product lines like games and unfortunately their office suites.
If anybody from Microsoft is reading this, here is how I would do things different "If I were King"(tm), or in other words, if I were CEO of Microsoft:
Set up a "venture capital" fund as Microsoft for their own employees to propose wild ideas. Some more bizzare than others. They still have to make very reasonable business plans to show that they can pull off the concept, and show they have the talents or can find the talents of people that could do it.
Encourage these employees by giving the "seed" money to get this project going. Set it up like a mini corporation itself, or perhaps even go through the whole mess of formal legal incorporation. It doesn't matter here, but the point is that Microsoft is risking its money and gets a cut in the profits from this new venture. The new employees of this group also get a huge stake...not in Microsoft in general (although that could be done as well), but specifically in this new division or "company". Let this group go for it, and then cut the umbillical cord very early forcing this new group to sink or swim. If it goes under, they lose their jobs, or at least have to reapply at Microsoft somewhere else. If the company succeeds, they will have made $$$$$ for Microsoft as well as themselves. Don't screw up the internal auditing process by charging stuff to this new division that doesn't really belong there, nor to force this new comany to only buy tools or devices from within the Microsoft framework of companies. Don't even worry if it competes against another product line of Microsoft. That is the point, they should be able to duke it out on their own.
One thing I see lacking for most software startups is a serious lack of money. That is one thing that Microsoft has in abundance, and even if only 10% of these venture business succeeded, it would still be a profitable business concept for MS.
It is also important to note that this busines
I feel for the project leader. He is simply saying that he doesn't want to carry the torch any more. Period. It doesn't really matter what the reason is, although I can also understand what he is saying regarding crypto stuff having a bunch of really weird issues that should never be in the realm of Computer Science.
Part of that is because we are talking about national governments trying to control information flow (notably the U.S. government), and litterally thousands of patents that control who can do what and when with the algorithms. Of all areas of CS, this is perhaps the most litigated subject and has the most restrictions of free speech when discussing this topic. It really is a mine field of trying to know what you can get, and trying to get people who are in the know to spill the beans about what is occuring as well. If patents don't get you, then government security agencies will.
As far as lies are concerned, there is deliberate mis-information going on as well with this branch of computer science. Those are the lies he is talking about. Normally with trying to get computer equipment working, it is so difficult to figure out what is working and what isn't, that you simply presume that the written documentation has mistakes like the wrong pin number or an error code that is one or two numbers off. If documentation is deliberately obfusated to even include mathmatical formulas that are close, but don't really work, or sample code that has intentional holes, you are going to be really lost. Much of this is intentional, on the part of national governments. Some is also due to competitors who are trying to throw potential rivals off from each other. There are "honest" people involved as well, and the trick is trying to know who is your friend and who doesn't really care.
Technological comapnies have had a boom/bust cycle since the 1940s with the Manhattan Project taking most talented engineers and then dumping them once "the bomb" was developed. This was also repeated in the 1960's with Apollo program sucking up Electrical Engineers like there was no tomorrow (together with mechanical and in some cases civil engineers as well) then with the cancellation of Apollo 18 the whole situation collapsed.
Go back and read what the employment situation was like for Electrical Engineers back in the 1970s was like. I heard figures close to 50% unemployment for E.E.s during at least part of the '70s. What this did was set the stage for massive entrepreneurial growth, because suddenly massive amount of highly trained talent was available to move into new directions rather than being consumed by these massive projects.
Right now I see the same sort of thing happening in the software industry, where college CS graduates are being "bought" for cheap and there is quite a bit of entrepreneurial activity to start the next wave of software companies. It won't be the companies that you are familiar with, or even writing the kinds of software that has been written before. It has been done before, which is why it won't be done.
There are a lot of companies right now that are working "under the radar", that aren't a part of that 600 that will be doing the mega mergers. One problem, however, with all of this merger, fallout, and new company cycle is that software developers are kinda out in the cold as they get older, and glowing pension plans and 401K plans mean next to nothing when you really think about it. What this means when large numbers of software developers start to go grey remains to be seen.
Yes, it was wrong, very wrong.
Look, I'm not trying to say that NASA should be participating in "corporate welfare" activities that give everything away to corporate interests, although it could be argued that the net effect of what NASA has been doing over the past 20 years is precicely that. I really scratch my head with the "United Space Alliance" group that is currently running the Space Shuttle program, where essentially NASA has given away the space shuttles to private companies. When STS-1 was launched, most of the personnel at KSC were NASA personnel or manufacturing representitives of the components that went into the shuttle. Most of the people there now are either employees of "USA" (notice what they did with the name of their company) with only a very small handful of actual NASA employees.
Basically, this is the worst of all worlds, because you have this big fat company litterally collecting billions of tax dollars for their shareholders that is supposedly a "private space transportation company" but have little to no incentive to branch beyond simply servicing the basic requirements that NASA asks for. Also, as a NASA contractor they simply can't fire up the shuttle on their own and throw something into space whenever they want, they still have to get permission from Congress each time it goes up. You want to talk about a political process, and that is just to send a single crew into space.
If that is giving away the "people's enterprise", I'm sorry, but it's already been done, and done poorly at that.
I really like the direction that the FAA/AST has been going, and they are not just premissive of the X-Prize, but very enthusiastic to help out. They even hand-delivered the launch certification for Space Ship One (although I don't expect that in the future.) For a government bureaucracy, they really aren't too bad as they are still small enough to at least match the current private space launch industry at the moment.
It would have been telling if Eisenhower would have offered an X-Prize like goal for private enterprise to build spaceships instead of the government program that became NASA. There had been a tradition of aviation prizes, although government sponsored prizes are still controvercial. It also would have outlined a clear difference between an American approach vs. following the "commies" into space.
But that is sour grapes. All I can say is that we now know quite a bit for how to travel in space, and that research is really going to save lives, regardless for what private individuals are going to be doing in the future.
While this is an interesting idea, I have yet to see a single instance of community pressure to get the /. staff to do anything. Their main comment:
/., and there are some good community-building features here, but response to the community, particularly in the message forums, is practically nil (or NULL, depending on your language).
If you don't like it, make your own site and do what you want. This is our site, so buzz off if you don't like it.
Or something to that effect. I like
All that happens, at best, when you complain about it is that you lose karma. I got karma to burn, so I don't care. That is why I'm joining you in the complaing, but being very apethetic regaring if it will make any difference.
While I will agree with you that a considerable amount of space research has paved the way for the current "boom" of space-based enterprises, the U.S. government hasn't exactly been all that cooperative in dealing with entrepreneurs who want to do things in space.
/. for further details.
For the most part, all NASA cared to do was encourage "private business" to be a parts source for their pet projects. Primarily from aircraft companies who were renamed "aerospace", but there was always much more air than space for all of them. NASA astronauts were considered "elite" specialists and mere mortals should never consider even applying to become an astronaut. A minimum of a PhD and 1000 hours of flying multi-engine jet FAA certification minimum. All astronauts are eventually certified to fly the shuttle, even if it is not their primary job classification. The idea is mainly to have emergency backups just in case something happens to the pilot. And that is just the folks that go into space (Senator Jake Garn not withstanding, and even he had over 1000 hours of multi-engine FAA certification... Senator John Glenn... well, he was a test pilot at one time, you know?)
I know of at least two commercial groups that went to Rockwell International (back when they existed) and begged to buy a shuttle. They had the financing already lined up, and by that time the shuttle was FAA certified for spaceflight. NASA came in and said "No!", especially because there was no "civilian" oversight agency to approve such a flight. Had this one act been approved, rather than having 3 questionable shuttles they would have had a dozen or more, and made the ground crew at KSC really worth their mettle and expense. It would have been cheaper to fly shuttle missions, and the Shuttle program would have actually meant something.
In addition, back in the early days of the Shuttle program, was proposing all sorts of private development efforts to use cargo capacity of the Shuttle. Indeed, this was one of the major selling points to congress, that finally private enterprise could get into space, which was something that the Apollo program simply could never afford the opportunity to do. There was even proposals for "space tourists" in a specially developed passenger module that would fit in the back of the Shuttle. Estimates for as many as 20 additional passengers on the shuttle could be accomodated. Additional commercial access was supposedly offered through the G.A.S. (Get-Away Special) cans, where for a certain fee any private citizen could "rent" the space and put anything in it that you wanted to fly into space. I think a couple of companies did eventually do this, but very soon it was restricted to bona-fide research companies or universities (especially post-Challenger). A friend of mine that still has ties to the Utah State/Space Dynamics Lab has said to me that the G.A.S. program has been totally canceled now. There will be no more programs like that going into space. Period. On an unmanned rocket, perhaps, and that is what is keeping the SDL going right now. On Space Ship One? One can only hope.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that NASA has indeed be a major obsticle to allowing commercial development in space. The Administration for Space Transportation (AST... they've changed their name a couple of times too but they are still called the AST) is finally starting to change the government perception of what should and should not go into space. Let's see what happens when John Carmack sends in his application. BTW, he is preparing to do a major test this week or next, so stay tuned to